On topics of gastronomy

I had a post to make a week or so ago, and then things got busy, and, well, you know...
Food and/or cooking may not seem to be directly related to gardening, but we do a lot of cooking here; using produce from the garden or the farmers market and eggs from our flock, so there is some relationship there. I'm not going to turn this into a cooking blog, but I think it's nice to occasionally celebrate the fruits of our gardening labors.
For the Fourth, we, like millions of other people, grilled out. Nothing super fancy, just barbecued chicken with homemade barbecue sauce. Secret BBQ sauce ingredient? Dr. Pepper. Nice amount of sweetness and acidity. Looks pretty good, eh?

Just look at those grill marks...

There were some good sides as well: Smoked trout potato salad, broccoli salad and grilled corn on the cob.

To minimize a preponderance of food related posts, I'll stick tonight's meal in here as well. Fried green tomato BLT with cheesy grits and broccoli. The tomatoes were home grown and the broccoli came from the farmers market.

The sandwich was sublime. Toasted sourdough, homemade remoulade, crispy bacon, cold lettuce, green tomatoes dipped in buttermilk and cornmeal and a slice of fresh, ripe tomato. I'm sweating bacon, and I mean that in a good way.

Backporch Bonanza

Mostly tomatoes and herbs, but also a few sunflowers, some rhubarb and an okra plant.

We got hit with three pretty bad hail storms in about two weeks, so I'm surprised how well these plants are doing.

We brought in two types of zucchini and red and green tomatoes today. The zucchini will probably go on the grill, and we've already made some fried green tomatoes. This is our first ripe tomato to come off, so that's pretty exciting. It's hard to describe how much better food tastes when it's really and truly fresh.

Raised Beds, redux

So, this season, we added two more raised beds to our arsenal. I've changed the design a bit from last years model, and I think it works a lot better. These were all built from lumber from the big box home improvement place down the road, and filled with a mixture of cheap garden soil, Black Kow-brand manure and compost.

I do want to note that this is regular lumber, not the pressure treated stuff. I'm willing to forgo some longevity in order to avoid the chemicals found in pressure treated lumber. Design-wise, I skipped the hinges this year and made a track to allow the door to slide in and out. This makes access easier and simplifies the construction quite a bit. I think I can slap one of these together in less than an hour now.

And that's the take in the old bed: Chard, kale, pak choy, carrots, wando peas, beets and radishes, and a few other things. It's an incredible thing to be able to grow your own food, to take the kids out to pull a pea off the vine and eat it, right there in the garden. It reconnects us to what's real, and what's important.